Late on a sunny Tuesday morning last month at the Waterford municipal complex located off Hartford Road, officers from throughout the state led out dog after dog on leashes to sniff for narcotics hidden in town vehicles slated to go to auction months from now.

Magnum, a 17-month-old German Shepherd serving as a K-9 for New Haven Police Department, stopped in his tracks as he found a pouch of drugs hidden in a white sedan. His handlers congratulated him with playful petting and a game of tug of war with a chew toy.

“Good boy, good boy, oh–ho–ho,” an officer cooed.

“Everything we teach the dogs in training is a game,” said Waterford Officer Dan Lane.

Lane is master trainer for the department and oversees the training program Waterford has had since 2008. It is for police departments from Connecticut and sometimes from out of state as well. Training sessions happen as area departments express a need for them, Lane said.

Waterford trains dogs for narcotics searches and patrol, which includes lives searches. Other area departments have dogs that are trained for other purposes; New London Police, for example, have a dog that can locate cadavers by smell.

Waterford police went through a period without K-9 officers from the mid-90s up until 2001, according to Lt. Stephen Bellos. The first dog in the revamped program was Czar, retired early due to medical problems, followed by Blitz, who served the department for a full decade.

The department currently has two narcotic and patrol dogs. Lane handles 6-year-old Belgian Malinois Ike, and Officer Patrick Flanagan is in training with 15-month-old Tonka, a German shepherd from Hungary.

The training program in progress lasts 13 weeks. Drugs are supplied to the department by the DEA, which acquires the drugs through seizures. Lane said the federal agency provides Waterford with marijuana, cocaine, heroin and meth for training.

One morning last month when the dogs were practicing searching cars, officers placed drugs packaged in various types of receptacles in the nooks and crannies of two sedans and two trucks. A small burlap bag of cocaine was tucked in a gas cap of a sedan, marijuana in a black vinyl bag was hidden in a compartment near the driver’s seat of a pickup truck, all the typical places, Lane said.

Training for narcotics searches takes place for four of the 13 weeks, following an initial week of socialization of the dogs, according to Lane. He said of the eight dogs in training, one was trained to paw at the location of found drugs while the others were trained to simply sit in front of whatever was found.

Other weeks will be spent on aspects of patrol including live searches, or searches for living missing people or suspects.

When the dogs aren’t training, they live at the home of their handlers. Lane and Flanagan, both married with children, said the dogs behave not unlike typical pets.

“When I bring him home,” Flanagan said of Tonka, “he’ll roll over on his back, he’ll lick the kids.”

Bellos credits Lane with the strength of the current K9 program, including handling dogs in the department and training dogs from other departments. He said K-9s enhance Waterford’s ability to quickly search the town’s many large buildings, especially buildings associated with retail such Home Depot and the buildings at Crystal Mall.

“They have a better nose than a human,” Bellos said.

t.townsend@theday.com